Edit: If you have not seen sous vide cooking: http://amath.colorado.edu/~baldwind/sous-vide.html
It looks amazing to me.
There is a better home option now than the rice cooker + pid timer( which does not circulate water and leads to uneven cooking. http://www.sousvidesupreme.com/
This is as good as you can get without buying a $995 dollar immersion circulator(which you should buy if you can).
Pick up the more expensive foodsaver, if you can't afford a commercial unit. I cook at arazorashinyknife.com these days, and our commercial unit which costs $5000 just died on us, it cost $1000 just to have a guy look at it -.-
http://cookingissues.wordpress.com/2010/02/02/coming-soon-so... Here is a primer on sous-vide cooking, which by the way can can be done the ghetto way by sealing a sturdy ziplock bag almsot under water, to get as much air out as you can. Then you can leave a large pot of water running under the hot water tap until you can get the water to the temperture you need.
It seems that corporate profits trump safety these days. How much rocket fuel is safe to drink in our public water supply? What are a few deaths against the right to corporate earnings?
I've seen (IRL) the sous vide supreme appliance, and have a peer who got to use one for a couple weeks, and if you've got the ghetto rig, the SVS doesn't add anything. Hacker News types are better off with the PID controller.
Curious to know what your HN-related project is, yeah.
Especially, you can't do the spectacular compressed stuff without one of those.
You can get sous-vide-like results sometimes without said equipment, though; Thomas Keller's Ad Hoc at Home book contains a lot of unstated backports from sous vide techniques. For instance, he has you blowtorch a big prime rib roast and then cook it at very low temperature in the oven (275 F) for two hours. It reliably comes out with the uniform-pink-almost-all-the-way-to-the-edges effect. Presumably not quite as close.
If you want to (a) make watermelons with the texture of a strip steak or (b) cook SV in huge volume, you need to investigate high end equipment.
Otherwise, the concept behind SV is extremely simple. Precisely controlled temperature over long cooking time. The $120 PID controllers do that job just fine.
What have you read that says you need a cryovac to do SV well? The Baldwin guide actively endorses the ghetto setup, and there are numerous blogs of people succeeding with it. The Keller sous vide book isn't a home cookbook any more than the Alinea cookbook is. You're not making French Laundry food at home no matter how you equip your kitchen.
I would think you still need something vaguely vacuum-sealer-like, since as the Baldwin guide says any air pockets will expand and insulate half the object.
But I suppose I'll try the $40 vacuum sealer.
It would be pretty awesome if you documented how you made it work (especially if you do it in such a way that is cheap and easily reproducible).
2. Buy mechanically-switched Black & Decker rice cooker @ $40.
3. Buy Seal-a-Meal vacuum sealer @ $40.
4. Buy two aged rib-eye steaks.
5. Pat steaks dry, salt liberally, pepper.
6. Seal steaks in a single vacuum-sealed bag with 1 tbsp of butter for each steak.
7. Set Auber PID controller for 131f.
8. Put sealed steaks in the bottom of the rice cooker. Fill with water.
9. Ensure that the thermal probe from the PID controller is in the water.
10. Ensure that the rice cooker is plugged into the PID controller, and the PID controller into the wall.
11. Walk away for 4 hours.
12. Heat peanut oil in a skillet until shimmering.
13. Remove steaks from water bath. Pat dry. Oil should be just-smoking.
14. Sear steaks on both sides, 30-40 seconds per side.
15. Rest meat 10-15 minutes.
16. Serve.